Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

Google Street view is awesome. You can pan, zoom, and view street level photographs. Unfortunately, this service is only available for major cities in the US. If you want to see street views of Chinese cities, try city8.com (城市吧).

City8.com is Chinese web map service that shows street level photographs of major Chinese cities. The site also features some social web functions. Users can vote on popular city locations and recommend places to eat, shop and play.

A demo video (in Chinese) is available on the front page. Here is a view of the Beijing Tiananmen Square on City8.com.

Spotted on: Virtual China

Twitter is a popular micro-blogging web service. Micro-blogging services differ from the traditional blogging services in that they restrict the maximum length of a blog entry — e.g., Twitter blogs must contain less than 140 characters. Twitter is one of the hottest social web applications today.

Many mashups have been developed around Twitter. Here is a few interesting map-related Twitter mashups:

1. TwitterMap: displays latest twitter messages on a map based on the author’s physical location.
2. TwitterVision: an animated mashup that cycles through latest twitter messages on a map.
3. TwitterVision 3D: same as TwitterVision, except that messages are displayed on a 3D Earth globe.
4. TwitterWhere: given a location name and this service will return an RSS feed of twitter messages that came from the vicinity of this location.

I’m not an active Twitter user, but I enjoy playing with Twitter mashups. Reading random Tweets (Twitter messages) are actually entertaining. As the Social Web embraces micro-blogging, there is much to be learned from the world of Tweets.

Yahoo! Mapmixer is a mashup service that allows users to overlay map images on the top of Yahoo! maps. Many people will find this service useful and fun because they can combine atypical map data with the standard street map and satellite map.

I played around with the Mapmixer and created a UMBC’s campus map.The service is relatively easy to use. No special GIS knowledge is required. There is one technical problem with the overlay function. The Mapmixer works great if the uploaded map image is scaled properly (e.g., Yosemite Valley Hiking Map) . If the image is a pictural map, for example, the resulting map will contain serious image distortion. This is case for the UMBC campus that I have created.

Intel announced a new research project called Mash Maker, which is aimed to help users to augment web page functions using mashup technology. The technical details of this project is still sparse. Nevertheless, from the available documentations, we can guess the basic capability of the service.

Problem Statement

There has been a lot of hype about mashups recently, and with good reason. Mashups are allowing us to transform the Internet from being a collection of separate website islands, into a unified intelligence in which knowledge from one web site can be automatically combined with knowledge from another.

But mashups have still not really penetrated the mainstream. My mother is not using mashup sites, and she is definitely not creating them. Even if there was a mashup out there that did exactly what she wanted, the chances are that she wouldn’t know it existed, and would be confused by it if she tried to use it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently The Economist magazine published two different articles that paint the vision of the future Web. In the first article — “The World on your desktop“, the author talks about how geo-browsers (e.g., Google Earth) and map mash-ups have changed the landscape of our internet ecosystem. In the second article — “The web: some antics“, the author describes a future Web that is built on metadata and semantic descriptions (e.g., RDF and OWL).

Today Google will release a new version of Google Earth that allows Internet users to view the skies as seen from Earth. This new service called Sky allow users to fly around and zoom in, exposing increasingly detailed imagery of some 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies.

The Sky imagery was stitched together from more than one million photographs from scientific and academic sources, including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Palomar Observatory at the California Institute of Technology and the NASA-financed Hubble.

Google said that it developed the project strictly because some of its engineers were interested in it, and that it had no plans to make money from it for now.

Spotted on the New York Times and Olge Earth.

The New York Times has an interesting article on how Web-based map tools are reshaping “the mapmaking business”. The thesis of this article is something that we are all familiar with: On the Web, anyone can be a mapmaker.

There is something intrigue about amateurs making maps on the Web. They make maps not because they want to chart new territories or help others to navigate in the physical world. But rather, they create new maps to tell stories and organize information that otherwise would be forgotten or lost.

For example:

James Lamb of Federal Way, Wash., created a map to illustrate the spread of graffiti in his own town and ask other residents to contribute to it.

I highly recommend this article. We (people who work in the geospatial technology field) often think too much about the technology aspect of the map tools, and pay little attention to the kind of social impact that was brought about by the technology. It’s time to see a bigger picture and reflect. Reading this article will help us to do that just that.

Resource: With Tools on Web, Amateurs Reshape Mapmaking

Mapplets are widgets can be added to Google Maps. It’s a new way to create mashups. Instead of creating separate Web pages for the mashup applications, using Mapplets, new functionality can be dynamically injected into the standard Google Maps web page. In general this is a good news to all mashup developers. It provides a new platform for innovation. However, this brings back an old issue: privacy. First, when using Google Maps as a mashup platform, developers are effectively giving Google all information that is used by or can be inferred from their Mapplet applications. It’s hard to predict what Google will do with this information. Second, do end-users have control over what information is sent to third-party Mapplets? Third, can hackers exploit Mapplets to inject malicious scripts to monitor the computing activities of Google Maps users? While I don’t discourage people from using Google Maps or Google Mapplets, but privacy is an issue that people must be aware of. This is an extremely critical issue. Especially it’s because our Web Browsers are beginning to act like an Operating System.